This application is related to Japanese Patent Application No. HEI 10(1998)-350057 filed on Dec. 9, 1998 whose priority is claimed under 35 USC xc2xa7119, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a display device, a display method and a storage medium containing therein a display control program for displaying image data of a standard pixel number converted from image data of a pixel number different from the standard pixel number.
2. Description of the Related Arts
Conventional liquid crystal display devices often suffer from such a problem that an unsightly image is displayed on a liquid crystal panel thereof when display data of a lower resolution than the resolution of the liquid crystal panel is inputted thereto.
A first approach to this problem is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. HEI 10(1998)-83168, which proposes a liquid crystal display device which is capable of expanding image signals (image data) of a lower resolution than the resolution of a liquid crystal display panel thereof to display the image data on a greater scale.
The liquid crystal display device is arranged in the following manner.
Each pixel in display data is simply doubled for the data expansion.
A pixel to be interpolated between adjacent pixels is produced by processing display data of the adjacent pixels by means of a horizontal computation circuit and a vertical computation circuit for weighing display data.
When display data of a lower resolution than the resolution of the liquid crystal display panel is inputted to the display device, a scanning drive circuit for scanning the liquid crystal display panel horizontally and vertically expands the display data by increasing the number of horizontally arranged dots and the number of lines to display the display data on a greater scale on the liquid crystal display panel.
FIG. 8 is a diagram illustrating an image data expanding process according to a second approach to the aforesaid problem. In accordance with the second approach, where a code of a character is included in image data of a lower resolution, for example, the character is processed as dot data and enlarged on a dot basis. Therefore, when original characters represented by image data 30 are enlarged, jaggy characters represented by image data 31 are displayed as shown in FIG. 8.
In the first approach, however, where predetermined image data is scaled up or down, the scaling factor is controlled by variably setting the number of lines to which a voltage is to be selectively applied by the scanning drive circuit. Therefore, it is necessary to preliminarily set the number of lines for the voltage application in accordance with the scaling factor. This makes it impossible to concurrently display image data of different resolutions.
In the second approach, the characters are processed as dot data and enlarged on a dot basis, so that the enlarged characters are unsightly with jaggy profiles.
In accordance with the present invention, there is provided a display device which comprises: a display section for displaying a window frame of a standard pixel number; a data acquiring section for acquiring image data of a given pixel number from any of various applications; an image data storing section for storing therein the image data; a pixel number determining section for determining the pixel number on the basis of attribution data attached to the image data; a pixel number judgment section for judging whether or not the pixel number is smaller than the standard pixel number preliminarily stored in a standard pixel number storing section; a data expanding section for expanding the image data to increase the pixel number of the image data to the standard pixel number, if the pixel number is smaller than the standard pixel number; and a display control section for controlling the display section to display the expanded image data in the window frame of the standard pixel number so that the window frame which contains the expanded image data can coexist with a window frame which contains image data of the standard pixel number on the display section.
With this arrangement, the image data of the standard pixel number and the image data whose pixel number has been increased to the standard pixel number from the pixel number smaller than the standard pixel number can concurrently be displayed in different window frames on the display section.